Abstract
Cancer remains a heavy health burden resulting in a high rate of mortality around the world. The presently used anticancer drugs suffer from several shortcomings, such as drug toxicity, poor biodegradability and bioavailability, and poor water solubility and drug resistance. Cancer is treated effectively by combination therapy whereby two or more anticancer drugs are employed. Most of the combination chemotherapies result in a synergistic effect and overcome drug resistance. Furthermore, the design of polymer-based nanocarriers for combination therapy has been reported by several researchers to result in promising therapeutic outcomes in cancer treatment. Curcumin exhibits good anticancer activity but its poor bioavailability has resulted in its incorporation into several polymer-based nanocarriers resulting in good biological outcomes. Furthermore, the incorporation of curcumin together with other anticancer drugs have been reported to result in excellent therapeutic outcomes in vivo and in vitro. Due to the potential of polymer-based nanocarriers, this review article will be focused on the design of polymer-based nanocarriers loaded with curcumin together with other anticancer drugs.
Highlights
Cancer is explained as a severe metabolic disease that causes a high rate around the world there are various available interventions [1,2]
Various approaches are utilized in cancer treatment including surgery, immunotherapy, radiotherapy, hormonal therapy, and chemotherapy [5,6]
Targeting one pathway with conventional chemotherapy is not an effective approach for the treatment of cancer, and it usually results in the development of multidrug resistance [10]
Summary
Cancer is explained as a severe metabolic disease that causes a high rate around the world there are various available interventions [1,2]. Targeting one pathway with conventional chemotherapy is not an effective approach for the treatment of cancer, and it usually results in the development of multidrug resistance [10]. Polymer-based nanocarriers such as nanoparticles [13,14,15,16,17], nanoliposomes [18,19,20,21,22], nanocapsules [23,24,25,26], nanomicelles [27], polymer-drug conjugates [28,29], hydrogels [30], and dendrimers [31,32,33,34] have been reported for the combination of curcumin and other therapeutic agent(s) for the treatment of cancer [35]. This article will focus on interesting therapeutic outcomes of polymeric nanocarriers co-loaded with curcumin for the treatment of cancer in vitro and in vivo
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